[ecrea] New book on global iconic events: Julia Sonnevend: Stories Without Borders

*Julia Sonnevend: Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the 
Making of a Global Iconic Event (Oxford University Press, 2016).*

What comes to be known and seen as a global iconic event? Focusing on 
news coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall and on contemporary 
retellings of the event, Julia Sonnevend discusses how storytellers 
build up certain events so that people remember them for a long time. 
The East German border opening that we know as the "fall of the Berlin 
Wall" was in fact unintentional, confusing, and prompted in part by 
misleading media coverage of bureaucratic missteps. But its global 
message is not about luck or accident or happenstance in history. 
Incarnated as a global iconic event, the fall of the Berlin Wall has 
come to communicate the momentary power that ordinary people can have. 
The event's story, branded as a simple phrase, a short narrative and a 
recognizable visual scene, provides people from China to Israel to the 
United States with a powerful social myth. This myth shapes our debates 
about separation walls and fences, borders, and refugees, and the 
possibilities of human freedom to this day.

Available for order: 
https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Without-Borders-Berlin-Making/dp/019060431X

Blurbs:

"Julia Sonnevend's book is not only a splendid work of cultural history 
but a brave attempt to rethink the place of media in modernity. At once 
lucid, iconoclastic, and constructive, Stories Without Borders helps us 
imagine how events become not only larger but also smaller than life, 
only to become larger again; how they crystallize into milestones as 
well as signposts at crossroads. Without succumbing to chic theoretical 
turns or what she deftly calls 'the tyranny of details,' she helps our 
collective intelligence along a needed path to maturation."

--Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Columbia University

"Challenging the corrosive discourse of suspicion, Julia Sonnevend 
demonstrates the continuing, indeed pivotal presence of the symbolic in 
contemporary life. Beautifully written, rigorously conceptualized, and 
deeply researched, /Stories without Borders/ is a brilliant exemplar of 
cultural sociology."

--Jeffrey C. Alexander, Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology, 
Yale University

"Did the Wall really fall? This book is important for showing how 
collective memory can construct a media event-retrospectively!"

--Elihu Katz, Emeritus Professor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the 
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

--

Julia Sonnevend is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the 
University of Michigan. She has held fellowships at the Hebrew 
University in Jerusalem, the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, 
and the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology in New Haven. Her 
interdisciplinary research examines the role of media events, rituals, 
performances and icons in global culture. She received her Ph.D. in 
Communications from Columbia University and her Master of Laws degree 
from Yale Law School.

Upcoming talks on the book include:

Ann Arbor: November 3, 2016 
http://www.literatibookstore.com/event/julia-sonnevend-william-uricchio

Prague: ECREA conference

Budapest: November 15, 2016

https://cmds.ceu.edu/events/2016-11-15/stories-without-borders-berlin-wall-and-making-global-iconic-event



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